New Sensory Approaches to the Past is a book about method. Rather than treating the senses as interpretive atmosphere, the collection argues that sensory archaeology and sensory heritage can be practised as explicit, inspectable inquiry, provided that researchers show how their sensory claims are produced—what is recorded, by whom, under what conditions, and how substitutions and constraints enter the chain of inference. This emphasis follows the editors’ stated aim to advance sensory research through ‘rigorous, repeatable approaches’ and to prioritise the ‘how and why’ of fieldwork. It also aligns with sensory anthropology’s long-standing insistence that sensory life is socially patterned and historically learned rather than a simple matter of more vivid description (Classen, Reference Classen1997; Howes, Reference Howes2005: 5).

The organization makes the methodological ambition legible. After Hamilton’s synthetic opening (Ch. 1), the research chapters are grouped by primary mode of data production: individual self-registered sensing research (Part I, Chs. 2–5), collected self-registering sensing research (Part II, Chs. 6–9), and externalized sensing research based on devices, standards, and modelling (Part III, Chs. 10–13). The editors frame this as a comparative scaffold for assessing efficacy across projects and for thinking about human–environment connectivity through different evidential routes. Read across the volume, the structure repeatedly returns the reader to a practical question: not simply what is sensed, but how sensing becomes a claim that can be evaluated.

The cases selected allow that comparative logic to operate across diverse contexts. Part I spans a contemporary ruin study that stabilizes affective experience through fixed material proxies (Bell, Ch. 2), an olfactory discussion of devotional encounter across temple and museum contexts (Khetrapal, Ch. 3), a kinaesthetic-temporal analysis of movement and time at Gabii (Graham, Ch. 4), and an experimental survey of Swahili coastal towns combining repeated walkovers, structured prompts, audibility/intelligibility tasks, and modelling (Baumanova, Ch. 5). Part II turns to collective and public settings, including team-based recording designed to generate datasets that can be placed alongside other archaeological methods (Hamilton, Ch. 6), managed access to Great War tunnel landscapes (Leonard, Ch. 7), participant self-recording of olfactory experience in a preservation context (Kirkbride, Ch. 8), and a public survey protocol connecting sensory encounter to conservation questions (Jordan and Mura, Ch. 9). Part III foregrounds device-led methods and their translation into reconstructive or visitor-facing outputs: an acoustics-to-auralization pipeline in an interactive environment (El-Dardiry, El Antably and Elkhateeb, Ch. 10), a methodological review of rock-art archaeoacoustics (Díaz-Andreu, Álvarez-Morales and Santos da Rosa, Ch. 11), acoustic measurement in dialogue with painted funerary space (Ortoleva, Ch. 12), and remote-sensing/GIS translated into an on-site application for engaging subsurface remains at Vulci (LoPiano, Ch. 13). Howes’ epilogue (Ch. 14) closes by situating the collection within sensory studies and emphasizing sense-making as socially embedded.

Given the book’s methods-led agenda, it is reasonable to focus on a small number of chapters as observatories for the three data-generation modes, while noting how other chapters develop the same concerns. In Part I, Bell (Ch. 2) offers a clear demonstration of how an embodied, situated encounter can become discussable evidence rather than remaining personal narrative. The chapter begins from autoethnographic engagement with abandonment and closure, but then poses a methodological question—whether qualitative sensation can be transformed into archaeological data—and responds by selecting a relatively stable proxy (fixed mark-making) and documenting its distribution in a way that can be re-analyzed, contested, or extended. The result models one of the volume’s recurring commitments: reflexivity paired with systematic recording. Within the same part, Baumanova (Ch. 5) most fully realizes the editors’ ‘repeatability’ ambition by specifying prompts, tasks, repetitions, and a modelling chain designed for comparative reuse; by contrast, Khetrapal (Ch. 3) is valuable in showing how olfaction is culturally and institutionally mediated, but the chapter’s more reflective mode makes replication and cross-project parameterization less straightforward than in the explicitly protocol-driven contributions.

Part II’s methodological centre is articulated in Hamilton (Ch. 6), which explicitly frames embodied work as ‘subject-centred’ rather than arbitrary and presents replication as a matter of collective calibration—shared prompts, repeated traversals, and recording parameters that allow multiple observers’ embodied feedback to be structured into datasets. The chapter is also important in how it positions sensory work in relation to other approaches: sensory interactions are not treated as a replacement for standard field methods, but as generating results that can be placed in dialogue with them.

Across Part II, the practicalities of mediation are treated as constitutive of experience. Leonard (Ch. 7) foregrounds managed access and safety infrastructures as shaping subterranean encounter, while Kirkbride (Ch. 8) shows how olfactory experience becomes entangled with memory and preservation politics through participant self-recording. Jordan and Mura (Ch. 9) draw these threads together most effectively by turning sensory prompting into a replicable public survey protocol that can be iterated across audiences and used to address conservation questions; crucially, they are explicit that prompting participants to attend to sensory modalities is itself an intervention that produces salience, and they treat that production as part of the phenomenon under investigation. This is also where the volume’s heritage-facing contributions connect particularly well to museum critiques of ocularcentrism and to arguments for expanding sensorial engagement as part of how museums produce knowledge—and, potentially, as a route toward decolonizing institutional practice (Krmpotich, Reference Krmpotich, Skeates and Day2020).

In Part III, device-led contributions sharpen both methodological gains and interpretive responsibilities. Díaz-Andreu, Álvarez-Morales, and Santos da Rosa (Ch. 11) benchmark robust practice in archaeoacoustics by foregrounding controlled protocols, documentation, and re-usable datasets. The Cairo contribution (El-Dardiry, El Antably, and Elkhateeb, Ch. 10) exemplifies the externalization of sensing to devices and models that collect data under defined parameters and feed them into reconstructive systems. The opportunity here is evident: modelling chains can make assumptions explicit and enable comparative work. The interpretive challenge is equally clear across the part: measured properties must be reconnected to questions about lived practice, and public-facing outputs (auralizations, overlays) require careful communication of uncertainty. Ortoleva (Ch. 12), in particular, illustrates both sides: measurement-led work can open the tomb space to aural–visual inquiry, but the inferential move from measured acoustics to historically specific experience needs especially careful framing to avoid overstating what the data can bear.

The editors also position the collection as a contribution to a wider research agenda, noting the importance of broadening geographical and cultural coverage for sensory approaches and observing that domestic contexts remain comparatively under-addressed and merit sustained attention. This framing presents method-building as a tractable project that can be extended into additional settings and domains.

Precisely because the volume is so method-driven, it brings into focus several questions that now deserve further attention. First, the collection clarifies why sensory approaches remain unevenly integrated into everyday archaeological practice. The issue is not simply recognizing that past life was multisensory, but the fact that established recording forms and report genres are still more readily aligned with visual and material traces than with explicitly sensory inference (Hamilakis, Reference Hamilakis2013; Skeates and Day, Reference Skeates, Day, Skeates and Day2020). Against this background, the editors’ insistence on procedural transparency—making explicit who senses, what is recorded, under what conditions, and how constraints and substitutions shape interpretation—reads as a practical route for moving sensory work into evaluable and reusable formats, rather than leaving it dependent on persuasive narrative.

Secondly, the collection’s deliberate alternation between single-modality (one sense) chapters and multisensory designs makes a methodological point without forcing a single solution. Single-modality or one-sense focus can enable clearer protocols and stronger parameterization, particularly in measurement-led work; multisensory studies and public protocols, meanwhile, show how modalities co-function in situated practice. The remaining task is not to choose between ‘one sense’ and ‘many senses’, but to make reintegration strategies more explicit—how robust parameters developed under focused conditions re-enter accounts of sensorial fields and historically specific meaning-making. Sensory-studies discussions of intersensoriality are useful here, not as a demand for impossible holism, but as a reminder that sensory experience is often patterned through relations and sequencing between modalities rather than through simple simultaneity (Howes, Reference Howes2005: 5–7). The volume already contains workable reintegration moves—movement and kinaesthesia as analytic levers, attention to sensory juxtapositions in social space, and reflexive handling of prompts—and a short editorial synthesis drawing these together across parts would have further strengthened the comparative framework.

A further tension, only intermittently addressed, is between the drive to protocolize sensing (so that projects can be compared and repeated) and the book’s own acknowledgement, via sensory anthropology, that sensory attunements are historically learned and socially patterned. Standardized prompts and recording sheets help make sensory work inspectable, but they also risk importing contemporary sensory hierarchies or vocabularies into contexts where sensory categories, thresholds, and meanings were differently configured. The methodological challenge, then, is not simply to add reflexive caveats, but to show how calibration, training, and contextual knowledge enter the protocol itself—so that ‘repeatability’ does not silently become repeatability of modern sensibilities rather than repeatability of an evidential procedure.

Thirdly, the collection advances sensory heritage by treating mediation as method. Across the public-facing chapters, guided access, safety infrastructures, survey instruments, and digital overlays are not treated as external ‘noise’ but as mechanisms that shape what visitors can sense and what becomes meaningful. This stance avoids idealizing unframed ‘authentic’ encounter and supports applied work in heritage settings. At the same time, as externalized outputs increasingly circulate in public contexts, shared conventions for communicating interpretative confidence and uncertainty become central to procedural transparency: immersive auralizations and visual overlays can feel authoritative even when they rest on provisional links in the evidential chain. A related extension concerns sensory diversity and access. If sensory archaeology is partly motivated by critiques of archaeology’s visual privileging, it also invites reflection on how heritage environments are encountered by differently sighted bodies. Multisensory interpretation is often framed as enrichment for predominantly sighted audiences; it could also be articulated more explicitly as an accessibility issue, asking how protocols, interpretative media, and reconstructed experiences work for blind and partially sighted visitors. Bringing such questions into the methodological discussion would strengthen the volume’s applied remit while remaining consistent with its emphasis on transparency and usability.

Overall, New Sensory Approaches to the Past succeeds as a field-building methods volume: its organization by data-generation mode provides a comparative scaffold, and its strongest chapters—especially those that specify prompts, repetitions, recording parameters, and data pipelines—demonstrate how sensory inquiry can be integrated into archaeological and heritage research while remaining explicit about constraints, substitutions, mediation, and uncertainty. If some contributions remain more aspirational in relation to the editors’ repeatability programme, they nonetheless play an important role in showing where sensory method meets culturally specific meaning-making and where protocolization will require further conceptual and practical work. What distinguishes the book is not the general claim that the past was multisensory, but the sustained attention to how sensory claims are made, stabilized, and communicated across disciplinary and public contexts.